Ottawa will no longer accept cash payments from people paying their taxes at service counters across the country. The Canada Revenue Agency says it will still accept cash payments made through banks, however. Service counters will continue to accept cheque and debit payments.

Apparently it's too inconvenient....

The agency says it made the change because the amount of people who pay by cash is so small.

Of the seven per cent of taxpayers who make payments at the service counters, less than one per cent pay by cash, said Revenue Canada spokesperson Heather Cameron.

"It comes down to the fact … that there's so few people that are actually making their payments in cash now," said Cameron.

And here I was thinking that it was legal tender and if you tendered it on the government in payment, the government is to accept the same. A refusal to accept would certainly give rise to the question of whether penalties or interest would accrue.

Actually, the word "tender" is a verb: a "legal tender" is an action, as in "I made a legal tender of Bank of Canada notes". The concept of a legal tender was introduced to ensure that people would accept paper and base metal as payment for goods and services. It works like this:

Bloggs brings a $1 chocolate bar to the store's cashier and tenders a loonie as payment. If the cashier refuses the loonie, the law of legal tender DEEMS the $1 payment to have been made: the chocolate bar is considered, by the law, to have been paid for by Bloggs. Bloggs owns the chocolate bar, as a result, so he is free to leave the store and take the chocolate bar with him.

I do not know that (a) our courts understand the law of legal tender all that well, or that (b) there hasn't been a change to the law. However, when I last looked at Canada's "Currency Act" (google it) certain denominations of paper and coin were still considered to have "legal tender" status.

Query whether a person who owes $10.00 in taxes, and who brings in a $10 Bank of Canada Note to the government teller, has made a legal tender of his taxes owing. Query whether, when the teller refuses the cash, the law deems him to have paid his taxes in full.

Query also: how long it would take for the government to amend the Currency Act to carve out an exception in respect of the payment of taxes.

Query: why you keep voting Liberal, Conservative, or NDP.

Query also: how much it would cost to move to the Bahamas (where there is no income tax) and run ones law practice or other consulting business via a video link.

(3) slip more money into the hands of their buddies in the charter banks

Of course people working in government are not exactly the sharpest or deepest of thinkers, and whatever the short term benefits derived from discouraging the use of cash, in the long term it will only discourage legitimate economic activity and drive more businesses underground and/or offshore.